Two dragons, shedding fire, had paused midway of the desert. One was the
Overland Express racing from Los Angeles to Kansas City; its fellow was
headed for the west. Both had halted for fuel and water and the
refreshment of the passengers. The dusk was gathering over the
illimitable sandy plain, and the sun, setting behind wind-blown buttes,
wore a sinister glow. By its fantastic light the men and women from the
trains paced back and forth on the wide platform, or visited the
luxurious eating-house, where palms and dripping waters, roses and
inviting food bade them forget that they were on the desert.
Kate and Honora had dined and were walking back and forth in the deep
amber light.
"Such a world to live in," cried Kate admiringly, pressing Honora's arm
to her side. "Do you know, of all the places that I might have imagined
as desirable for residence, I believe I like our old earth the best!"
She was in an inconsequential mood, and Honora indulged her with smiling
silence.
"I couldn't have thought of a finer desert than this if I had tried,"
she went on gayly. "And this wicked saffron glow is precisely the color
to throw on it. What a mistake it would have been if some supernal
electrician had dropped a green or a blue spot-light on the scene! Now,
just hear that fountain dripping and that ground-wind whispering! Who
wouldn't live in the arid lands? It's all as it should be. So are you,
too, aren't you, Honora? You've forgiven me, too, I know you have; and
you're getting stronger every day, and making ready for happiness,
aren't you?"
She leaned forward to look in her companion's face.
"Oh, yes, Kate," said Honora. "It really is as it should be with me. I'm
looking forward, now, to what is to come. To begin with, there are the
children shining like little stars at the end of my journey; and there's
the necessity of working for them. I'm glad of that--I'm glad I have to
work for them. Perhaps I shall be offered a place at the University of
Wisconsin. I think I should be if I gave any indication that I had such
a desire. The president and I are old friends. Oh, yes, indeed, I'm very
thankful that I'm able to look forward again with something like
expectancy--"
The words died on her lips. She was arrested as if an angry god had
halted her. Kate, startled, looked up. Before them, marble-faced and
hideously abashed,--yet beautiful with an insistent beauty,--stood Mary
Morrison, like Honora, static with pain.
It seemed as if it must be a part of that fantastic, dream-like scene.
So many visions were born of the desert that this, not unreasonably,
might be one. But, no, these two women who had played their parts in an
appalling drama, were moving, involuntarily, as it seemed, nearer to
each other. For a second Kate thought of dragging Honora away, till it
came to her by some swift message of the spirit that Honora did not wish
to avoid this encounter. Perhaps it seemed to her like a
fulfillment--the last strain of a wild and dissonant symphony. It was
the part of greater kindness to drop her arm and stand apart.
"Shall we speak, Mary," said Honora at length. "Or shall we pass on in
silence?"
"It isn't for me to say," wavered the other. "Any way, it's too late for
words to matter."
"Yes," agreed Honora. "Quite too late."
They continued to stare at each other--so like, yet so unlike. It was
Honora's face which was ravaged, though Mary had sinned the sin. True,
pallor and pain were visible in Mary's face, even in the disguising
light of that strange hour and place, but back of it Kate perceived her
indestructible frivolity. She surmised how rapidly the scenes of Mary's
drama would succeed each other; how remorse would yield to regret,
regret to diminishing grief, grief to hope, hope to fresh adventures
with life. Here in all verity was "the eternal feminine," fugitive,
provocative, unspiritualized, and shrinking the one quality, fecundity,
which could have justified it.
But Honora was speaking, and her low tones, charged with a mortal grief,
were audible above the tramping of many feet, the throbbing of the
engines, and the talking and the laughter.
"If you had stayed to die with him," she was saying, "I could have
forgiven you everything, because I should have known then that you loved
him as he hungered to be loved."
"He wouldn't let me," Mary wailed. "Honestly, Honora--"
"Wouldn't let you!" The scorn whipped Mary's face scarlet.
"Nobody wants to die, Honora!" pleaded the other. "You wouldn't
yourself, when it came to it."
A child might have spoken so. The puerility of the words caused Honora
to check her speech. She looked with a merciless scrutiny at that face
in which the dimples would come and go even at such a moment as this.
The long lashes curled on the cheeks with unconscious coquetry; the
eyes, that had looked on horrors, held an intrinsic brilliance. The
Earth itself, with its perpetual renewals, was not more essentially
expectant than this woman.
Honora's amazement at her cousin's hedonism gave way to contempt for it.
"Oh," she groaned, "to have had the power to destroy a great man and to
have no knowledge of what you've done! To have lived through all that
you have, and to have got no soul, after all!"
She had stepped back as if to measure the luscious opulence of Mary's
form with an eye of passionate depreciation.
"Stop her, Miss Barrington," cried Mary, seizing Kate's arm. "There's
no use in all this, and people will overhear. Can't you take her away?"
She might have gazed at the Medusa's head as she gazed at Honora's.
"Come," said Kate to Honora. "As Miss Morrison says, there's no use in
all this."
"If David and I did wrong, it was quite as much Honora's fault as mine,
really it was," urged "Blue-eyed Mary," her childish voice choking.
Kate shook her hand off and looked at her from a height.
"Don't dare to discuss that," she warned. "Don't dare!"
She threw her arm around Honora.
"Do come," she pleaded. "All this will make you worse again."
"I don't wish you ill," continued Honora, seeming not to hear and still
addressing herself to Mary. "I know you will live on in luxury somehow
or other, and that good men will fetch and carry for you. You exude an
essence which they can no more resist than a bee can honey. I don't
blame you. That's what you were born for. But don't think that makes a
woman of you. You never can be a woman! Women have souls; they suffer;
they love and work and forget themselves; they know how to go down to
the gates of death. You don't know how to do any of those things,
now, do you?"
She had grown terrible, and her questions had the effect of being
spoken by some daemonic thing within her--something that made of her
mouth a medium as the priestesses did of the mouths of the
ancient oracles.
"Miss Barrington," shuddered Mary, "I'm trying to hold on to myself, but
I don't think I can do it much longer. Something is hammering at my
throat. I feel as if I were being strangled--" she was choking in the
grasp of hysteria.
Kate drew Honora away with a determined violence.
"She'll be screaming horribly in a minute," she said. "You don't want to
hear that, do you?"
Honora gave one last look at the miserable girl.
"Of course, you know," she said, throwing into her words an intensity
which burned like acid, "that he did not die for you, Mary. He died to
save his soul alive. He died to find himself--and me. Just that much I
have to have you know."
At that Kate forced her to go into the Pullman, and seated her by the
window where the rising wind, bringing its tale of eternal solitude,
eternal barrenness, could fan her cheek. A gentleman who had been pacing
the platform alone approached Mary and seemed to offer her assistance
with anxious solicitude. She drooped upon his arm, and as she passed
beneath the window the odor of her perfumes stole to Honora's nostrils.
"How dare she walk beneath my window?" Honora demanded of Kate. "Isn't
she afraid I may kill her?"
"No, I don't think she is, Honora. Why should she suspect anything
ignoble of you?"
Silence fell. A dull golden star blossomed in the West.
"All aboard! All aboard!" called the conductors. The people began
straggling toward their trains, laughing their farewells.
"Hope I'll meet you again sometime!"
"East or West, home's the best."
"You're sure you're not going on my train?"
"Me for God's country! You'll find nothing but fleas and flubdub on the
Coast."
"You'll be back again next year, just the same. Everybody comes back."
"All aboard! All aboard!"
"God willing," said Honora, "I shall never see her again."
Suddenly she ceased to be primitive and became a civilized woman with a
trained conscience and artificial solicitude.
"How do you suppose she's going to live, Kate? She had no money. Will
David have made any arrangement for her? Oughtn't I to see to that?"
"You are neither to kill nor pension her," said Kate angrily. "Keep
still, Honora."
The fiery worms became active, and threshed their way across the
fast-chilling and silent plain. On the eastbound one two women sat in
heavy reverie. On the westbound one a group of solicitous ladies and
gentlemen gathered about a golden-haired daughter of California offering
her sal volatile, claret, brandy-and-water. She chose the claret and
sipped it tremblingly. Its deep hue answered the glow in the great ruby
in her ring. By a chance her eye caught it and she turned the jewel
toward her palm.
"A superb stone," commented one of the kindly group. "You purchased it
abroad?" The inquiry was meant to distract her thoughts. It did not
quite succeed. She put the wine from her and covered her face with her
hands, for suddenly she was assailed by a memory of the burning kisses
with which that gem had been placed upon her finger by lips now many
fathoms beneath the surface of the sun-warmed world.